“I heard that police and security staff are in every nook
of the streets. All defectors must take shelter and cannot come out of
it,” he said. “Most of the brokers appear to have returned home due to
the crackdown. Chinese residents also refuse to help defectors in dire
need of their support.” [....]The clampdown also targets activist groups that have been operating
near the border areas to help North Korean refugees. Chinese authorities
take issue with their visas, which are mostly intended for tourism, not
activism, activists said. Kim Young-hwan, a renowned human rights
activist, and his three colleagues have been held in China for
unspecified reasons since late March. They have been denied access to
their families, the South Korean consulate and legal assistance.“In recent weeks, more and more missionaries and activists have been
ordered to leave the country. (The Chinese authorities) even threatened
to punish them out if they don’t return home quickly,” said Peter Chung,
chief of the Justice for North Korea, an activist group based in Seoul.

China is, however, collaborating with the North Korean regime to import hand-picked North Korean workers
to labor in Chinese factories. In the past, the regime has collected
“voluntary” contributions from expatriate workers’ wages, leaving them
barely enough to live on. Even so, their pre-tax pay is probably still
much less than the wages that even Chinese workers would accept, which
means that two nominally socialist regimes get to split the profits
generated from the use of slave labor.